365: Garden Patch

While goofing around with the dogs in the yard I discovered a hidden garden patch. We have a vine of watermelons growing and a small tomato patch. We have no idea how these got here. We're guessing that the last renter used this area as a sort of organic "composting" patch and some seeds took root. Of course this kills us because last year we tried hard to tend and grow a garden and didn't grow squat. Someone else flung some seeds in the yard and they were blatantly ignored and now they're growing in the middle of fall! SIGH.

Our Garden: Part 3--Planting Day!

Our seeds from Victory Seeds finally arrived. Side note: although they were shipped in the time frame promised, the shipping was E X T R A O R D I N A R I L Y slow. It look 9 days for the seeds to get here from the time they sent me an email that said the seeds were shipped to the time they arrived at our house. Not sure if that has to do with the company or the USPS but thought it was worth mentioning.

The one thing that was really great about Victory Seeds is the packaging. All of the pertinent info you need for planting and sowing is right on the envelope! Excellent! That way we knew which ones needed to be put into an indoor seed box and what ones could be directly sown into the garden.


Speaking of garden...now that we had done all the prep work, it was finally time to actually get out to our garden! The plants that had already been sown inside (beans from Meijer and broccoli from Farmers Market) were ready to plant, along with the seeds that didn't need to be sprouted indoors first (carrots & onions).

We went out to our lovely little garden and started to rake up the soil to get it loosened up again and ready to plant. And look! I'm working!

After we did some measuring and discussing we decided to do some square foot plots for our first two rows. Note: we did not actually read up too much on square foot gardening, but looked over a few websites and made some mental notes and did a sort of modified approach for our garden.

Our first square foot is where we planted our broccoli seedlings. They were pretty robust so we felt more confident getting them in. We measured out their spacing and dug to the appropriate depth and plopped them in their holes. Since the tiller-man had advised us not to mix the Miracle Grow in the plot we instead lined holes with it and then covered them up with Miracle grow. Our hopes is that it would stimulate the little plants into growing into big strong full-grown vegetables!

After planting the broccoli at an appropriate depth we stood back to take a good look at our little babies! Yay for broccoli! Let's hope it grows!

After the broccoli we planted our beans that had begun to sprout. Then we took our carrot and onion seeds and sowed them directly into the soil as instructed on the package. It made me nervous not to have even a seedling to plant, but hopefully they work out! Carrots have to be planted really close so they are pictured below in the dark brown square. Onion seeds are really funny looking! They look like tiny pieces of mica or charcoal. They are shown below in the double row that is next to the carrot patch. The back row has the carrot patch, green beans, and then broccoli on the end.


After finishing up outside we came back inside and finished the job of sowing our many varieties of peppers and tomatoes. I realized I didn't document the sowing process for the beans so I decided to capture it when we did the big mama-jama.

First you take your indoor seeder, we used a Jiffy brand starter, and follow the directions. Ours said to put 1/8 cup of water per pellet to expand them. After carefully measuring a few we decided that would take forever and flooded the tray with water. Worked beautifully!


After the pellets were fully expanded we needed to open up the pods so that we could insert the seeds into the peat moss and soil. When Ange had done the last one she had discovered that even her little fingers made a mess of the pellets and that toothpicks made handy little tools! So we then made little openings in each pod for our seeds.


After mapping out which seeds would go in we dropped in the seeds (generally 2-3 per pellet), covered them back up (just mashing our fingers on top of the pellet) and stashed them out of direct sunlight. The fridge was the only place big enough and out of the way enough of sunlight, dogs and clumsy people to not get knocked over. Excuse the dust!


Now all that is left is maintenance and reaping the rewards! We'll keep you updated!

Our Garden: Part 2--Garden Prep--Pre-Planting

**This will be the second in a series about our experience as first time vegetable gardeners. Hopefully it will inspire others, or maybe other people will stumble across it and find it helpful. Let me be clear: WE KNOW NOTHING ABOUT BUILDING OR MAINTAINING A GARDEN. Hell, I've never kept anything green alive for more than like 2 weeks (besides grass or weeds and really those don't count because I've never done anything about them). Ange has kept houseplants alive but that's it. Check older posts to see the full story.**

Ok, now we had all the supplies...so what do we do next? Well we had a little sense and knew that we would need to till a plot. However, we did not have THAT much sense so we thought we would do it ourselves. Now, when I was at Meijer I saw that there was a manual hand-held gadget that was labeled "tiller" and I asked Ange about it. She said no way, that would take forever. Like I know anything so I just said ok. And clearly we didn't need to purchase some fancy piece of equipment that we may only use once a year (or maybe never again if this year's garden is a total bust). We decided to check a few places and see if we could rent a tiller. After checking a few places we found out that Lowe's on 10th St. had a rental section where you could rent tillers. So we headed over to Lowe's to check it out. It was a sunny day so they had all of their equipment laid out like a garage sale. So we checked out some of the tillers they had and saw a cute little tiller that just looked perfect. We could stash it in the back of the trusty little Cobalt and be tilling away in no time. We went in to check out the rental rate and see if we could get any tips.

Boo. Apparently our little baby tiller wasn't cut out to do the job. The guys start talking about tillers and the information is flying about 30,000 feet over my head and the only part I really heard was that "it would take several hours to till the minimum of 8 inches deep we'd need for a first time garden." Say what? We have to chew up 8 inches deep by 80 square feet of dirt. Yikes. Of course I didn't want to look like el supremo idiota in front of these two dudes so I was all "Oh yeah, totally." We ask what the cost would be. For a 4 hour rental it was $47. For a 24 hour rental it would be $65. Since we had never done tilling before they recommended the 24 hour period. And since they weren't open on Sundays we'd actually get the tiller until Monday morning. But since we were supposed to use a monster tiller to till the garden that meant trusty Cobalt would not be able to haul the tiller. That meant we'd need to borrow a truck. Hmmm. We told them that we'd have to find a truck and come back.

After we left the rental building I said to Ange "Dag, I didn't know we had to dig down 8 INCHES." And Ange goes "OHMYGOD I know!" which made me feel better. I thought I was just a major dumb head so I was glad that I hadn't just missed a major thing. We then realized that this was more of an undertaking than we realized. Not only was it going to cost us $65 but it was going to take hours and hours of back-breaking labor. Ok, maybe that's a little dramatic...but it was going to be hard work. More than we bargained for anyway. Queens of Craigslist we are we decided to see if there was anyone on Craigslist offering tilling services. We buzzed home, unloaded our goods and hit the interwebs.

Of course there were people offering tilling services! What were we thinking? We called a few people and sent a few emails and waited for estimates. The first one who got back to us quoted $65. Hey! That's not too bad. That would be the same amount as renting a tiller AND we wouldn't have to actually do anything! But of course we wanted to hear some comparable estimates. The second call we got gave us an estimate for $30! Holy smokes! That's crazy talk. Our third and final person offered their services for $50 and a guarantee that he would do it as many times as needed to get it done well and to our liking. We decided to go with the middle price point and scheduled him to come in a few days.

In the meantime I had to jaunt back to Bloomington to school but Ange had some days off so she decided to tackle some other projects. Like filling in the skamillion holes that Daisy has dug in the backyard and picking up the billions of pounds of dog poop that 5 dogs will produce. On a recent trip to IKEA I found a nice size bucket that I thought would work magnificently as a poop container for our new pooper scooper.

Wahoo! What a cute little pooper scooper and bucket!

Now I must digress for a moment. Ange and I have very different personalities when it comes to housework and household projects. I am the thinker and the planner, but also the laziest of all lazies. I will think through something and try and meticulously plan things so that I know they will work out well. But then I get tired of all that thinkin' and then it might just take me a century to follow through with the rest of the project. Ange on the other hand is the complete 180 opposite. She rarely thinks more than 5 seconds ahead but she totally kicks butt when it comes to getting stuff done. So when I bought the bucket I imagined that it would be a great place to put a GARBAGE BAG in it and not have to hold open a garbage bag twisting in the wind and risk smearing yourself with poop while struggling with a floppy bag and a giant poop scooper. Well we had the pooper scooper and bucket for a couple weeks and for some reason the poop just stayed on the ground. Well in Ange's excitement about the garden tilling she went all gung-ho poop scooping. Without a garbage bag in the bucket, leaving poop smears all over the bucket. And left it sitting in the yard, uncovered. And then it rained, a lot. So then we had a bucket full of poop slush. Yummo. But at least the poop was out of the yard, right?

Poop Sludge

Ange also marked off the garden area with some spray paint (with slight adjustments made for some concrete slab we never noticed in the yard before) before Mr. Tillerman came to till. We had decided to use the north-east corner of our yard because it got the most sun and was farthest away from the rest of the yard and we could keep our poopy dogs away.

Pre-tilling

After all that work Ange was antsy to get the garden started so she decided to also plant our green bean seeds in the mini-seed starter. Basically the seed starter is one bad ass little incubator. You run water over the little pods, they puff up, you make a little nook for the seeds, put the seeds in, cover them up, put the cover on and that's when the magic happens! It takes very little time before you see some progress. A lot of seeds need to be started inside before transplanting them to the outdoor garden.

Finally it was tilling time! Mr. Tillerman came over and tilled us a garden! We thought we'd till the garden and mix in the manure and Miracle-Gro in with the dirt. Mr. Tillerman recommended that we not mix in the Miracle-Gro and instead put that on topically. Since we don't know anything and he has tilled many-a-garden and professed to being a pretty good gardener we decided to follow his advice. And presto! We now had a garden plot! Ange built a fence around it and then it was safe from the dogs who would like to play right in it and probably poop all over it. Bad dogs.

The plot with ever present dogs.

Also we read in our "research" that we should do a pH test to test our soil. Apparently if it was out of whack we would need to do something about it. THANKFULLY our soil is in the pH normal range which works great for most veggies.

Ooooh, a pH testing kit!

The next weekend at the Farmers Market we saw that one of the vendors was selling some seedlings. They had some broccoli plants for only $1.25! He also said they could be planted ASAP as broccoli withstands some pretty cold temps so we didn't have to worry about morning frost. Sweet!

Now we just needed to wait for our seeds from Victory Seeds to arrive!

Our Garden: Part 1--Garden Prep--Shopping & Mapping

**This will be the first in a series about our experience as first time vegetable gardeners. Hopefully it will inspire others, or maybe other people will stumble across it and find it helpful. Let me be clear: WE KNOW NOTHING ABOUT BUILDING OR MAINTAINING A GARDEN. Hell, I've never kept anything green alive for more than like 2 weeks (besides grass or weeds and really those don't count because I've never done anything about them). Ange has kept houseplants alive but that's it.**

As you will recall, last year Ange and I got really into reading and learning about farmers markets and organic foods and like like. Last year we batted around the idea of starting a garden, but it was too late in the year to start one. We kept saying "Maybe next year." We even bought a book, The Complete Idiot's Guide to Edible Gardening. And then...it sat on the shelf for several months.

Spring started springing and the market started to look more promising so we decided that maybe we should revisit the garden idea. Actually I was pushing hard for it, but Ange was not so sure. After discussing it the truth came out: she didn't think I could do it, or at least hang with it. I'm so sure! I mean, I know I haven't been Miss One-with-Nature all my life and yes I don't like bugs or being dirty for no reason, but I've come a long way! I still hate bugs, but I can always use bug spray. I don't mind getting dirty if there is a purpose (veggies!) and I'm not just wallowing in mud like a barnyard animal or something. So I promised that YES I was really invested in this and YES I was aware there was dirt and probably bugs involved, but I really wanted to do it! Team AL (Ange & Linds) can accomplish anything together! So thoroughly convinced (or maybe half-way convinced) we ordered some heirloom seeds from Victory Seeds (carrots, 3 varieties of peppers, 2 varieties of onions, 2 varieties of tomatoes & 2 varieties of squash). So you might have a few questions...

Why Heirloom Seeds?

Um, we read Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver last year and she talked a lot about the benefits of using heirloom seeds. Long story short (the book IS 384 pages): heirloom seeds keep other varieties of veggies alive, kind of like protecting endangered species of animals. Just doing our part to keep the earth healthy.

Why Victory Seeds Company?

Um, their website was easiest to use. I looked at some other ones, Heirloom Seeds, Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds, and Seed Savers Exchange. They were all fine, but less easy to navigate, order and supply info about seeds. I know, totally lame. Basically it was a spur of the moment thing and since we hadn't read our lovely book, we just wanted the bare minimum info and the easiest point, click, pay. It was the 4th site that came up in our Google search. Other than that, we know nothing about them.

Why did we choose those specific veggies?

Again, laziness was the major factor. We thought about veggies we like, looked at both the website and our little book (we actually did pull it off the shelf!) and tried to guesstimate what would grow in our backyard, and what ones didn't seem to high maintenance. I know, totally well thought out right? Anyway, for the most part, we did ok. We seemed to pick out things that will work ok (although only time will tell!). The one thing we didn't look too closely at was planting guidelines in terms of space. This will become important in a bit.

So after picking out our veggies we go to the checkout page. Apparently lots of other slackers were getting on the seed buying wagon because they were backed up and said it would be at least 8-15 days before our seeds shipped. We were ok with that. It was going to take us a while to prepare the backyard for a garden anyway.

After all that rigorous prep work we needed a break. We took about 3 days off. Hahaha. Seriously, we did. When the weekend rolled around we finally decided we should get serious about the garden. On Friday while Ange was working I decided to go to Meijer to check out some tools and such. I thought it wouldn't be too hard to pick out some stuff. Wrong as usual. I was seriously at Meijer for like almost 2 hours. And I walked out with a hoe, a long handled cultivator, a hand-held shovel, a hand-held cultivator, a seed starter and 2 pairs of gardening gloves. But I did check out dirt and other things garden-y.

The next day Ange and I mapped out our garden plan. This took longer than you think. First we actually did have to find out some info about plant spacing and planting depth, etc. This is when we realized our impulse buys were not completely spot on, but not too bad. Apparently squash need to be reallllly far apart, and since we didn't want a ginormous garden we decided to shelf those for this year. We then thought we would find a replacement when we went back to the store. After arguing about the importance and sizing of space around the garden we finally had a map:

(Click to enlarge)

We then borrowed my stepmom's truck and went on a shopping rampage. Ok, maybe not rampage, but we did spend some decent money on our goods (I plan to do a cost-analysis post later, just FYI). We ended up buying 1200 lbs of dirt (30-40lb. bags), 200 lbs of manure (5-40 lb. bags), 200 lbs. of Miracle-Gro Garden Soil for Flowers and Vegetables (5-40 lb. bags), some green bean seeds (our replacement for the squash), a small seed starter, some garden decorations, and some mulch.

The 1200 lbs of soil wasn't for the garden. It was for all the holes that Daisy the jerk has dug in the backyard:


The mulch was also not for the garden, but for Ange to beautify the front flowerbeds. We had mixed feelings about the Miracle-Gro. They are part of the evil empire of agro-business but since we have never had a garden in the backyard and our soil was questionable we decided to put aside our values for a few and roll with it.

We also bought a soil pH tester kit, a roll of plastic fence and some stakes to block of the garden from nosy ned dogs, a pooper scooper so we could keep dog poop out of the yard and off our shoes, and a bucket to scoop poop into for easy removal.

Whew that was a lot of work. You definitely need to rest after that. We actually did a little bit more, but that falls into the next post: Garden Prep--Pre-Planting. Look for it soon!